


If I Disappear

by MakeTheMoon



Category: Actor RPF, Star Trek RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Based on a song, Depression, Drug Use, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, I'm addicted to people finding their home in someone else, M/M, Melancholy, Memories, Non-Linear Narrative, Wordplay as foreplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:00:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24373180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MakeTheMoon/pseuds/MakeTheMoon
Summary: He doesn’t want Zach to remember him like that. He wants Zach to remember him happy and clear-headed and so in love that he can’t stop smiling into the crook of Zach’s neck, but that’s not possible because Chris has never done that. Not with Zach.In which Chris thinks too much and Zach hasmanymemories.
Relationships: Chris Pine/Zachary Quinto
Comments: 7
Kudos: 31





	If I Disappear

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Mild suicidal ideation, more just a general discussion on death and a person’s legacy - no one's considering suicide, just wondering what would happen if they were gone. Also some casual mentions of recreational drug use - weed and alcohol. It's not as dark as that makes it seem, I promise.
> 
> I also didn’t look up where in the world anyone was in any given month or year specifically (I mostly just made it up based on what facial hair I wanted them to have).
> 
> And finally, this is based on my favourite song that I can only stand to listen to every 5 years or so. It's so sad, and yet so uplifting, and it's about life and death and how we leave people and how they remember us. It's The Trapeze Swinger by Iron and Wine. It's nine and a half minutes of poetry that'll explode your heart.

_*_

_And please, remember me that Halloween_   
_Making fools of all the neighbors_   
_Our faces painted white_   
_By midnight, we'd forgotten one another_   
_And when the morning came I was ashamed_   
_Only now it seems so silly_   
_That season left the world and then returned_   
_And now you're lit up by the city._

- _The Trapeze Swinger_ , Iron and Wine

Two o’clock in the morning has a curious air about it, just the right time to be melancholy if you’re alone, or boisterous if you’re with someone. Not quite the witching hour, but close enough that the air itself feels like static, emotions tumbling in and through and around a person and their surroundings.

It’s a great time to overthink or underthink; either contemplate the existence of the universe and all its contents, or make a split-second decision based on a specific part of the anatomy that you’ll regret in the morning.

This time it’s the former. Chris sits in his recliner, staring into space, or somewhere around the run on the rug he’s hauled through three moves in 16 years. His clock ticks away in the kitchen, which he can only vaguely hear because this house is too big. Too big for one person and their dog.

The house was built with a family in mind, and whoever owned it before him had decorated it accordingly. One blue room with glow in the dark stars on the ceiling, one pink room with clouds painted on the walls. A big master bedroom with a balcony and an ensuite. A full dining room big enough for a table that seats eight.

It echoes with Chris in it. There are three empty rooms, and he isn’t sure how many empty cabinets in the kitchen. He doesn’t need all this space, not for just himself anyway, and it’s what he always blames when he gets like this. Blames the too-big living room and the cold floors.

Tonight he’s pondering death. And life. And families. And his house.

He wonders how many people feel like this, and how often. Is it everyone, all the time? Is it three people, almost never; or somewhere in between? A bit empty and a bit too full of all the wrong things in all the wrong places. Not meeting anyone’s standards, especially his own, but exceeding anything he’d ever thought he would do. It’s a bit like drowning, but the real kind, not the movie kind. It’s not flailing hands and screaming and gurgling. It’s lungs too full to make a sound, and limbs too tired to keep you floating. He knows there’s a lifeguard, but the fear that the lifeguard won’t notice him is too real, so he feels the weight of it on his shoulders, the burden to get himself out of this.

He doesn’t believe in much, usually, content to let the universe roll how it will, a real southern California boy who goes with the flow and lets life wash over him. Breakups rarely hurt, and not getting a job he really wanted wasn’t much of an issue; he could compartmentalize and understood that’s just how the world worked. Someone or something else would come along, they always did. If they didn’t, he could deal with that, too. He could entertain himself.

*

_Zach picks up his coffee at too-early o’clock, in the dark, and it’s a miracle this place is even open already. He definitely needs coffee before getting those ears and eyebrows on. Four days of it was all it took for the novelty to wear off and for Zach to resign himself to this life for the next five months._

_It takes no time to get to the studio and swipe his card to pull into the parking lot. He doesn’t even look at his own trailer, just ambles over to makeup._

_He’s sipping his coffee when he opens the door and meets too-blue eyes. He raises an eyebrow, tilts his head, and Chris just grins and says, “Figured you’d like some company.”_

_Chris gets up early and sits with him in makeup almost every day they’re filming together._

*

Not only does 2 a.m. seem a bit of a strange time, but October really messes with him. Every year, October comes along like every other month, like it thinks it’s exactly the same as the others. It has the gall to rock through Chris’s life like nothing happened.

October brings a lot of things with it. It has a _lot_ of baggage. It was October when Chris got his first girlfriend. It was October (the same October) when he had his first breakup. It was October when he got his first acting job, too; he remembered because he was a bit ridiculously dressed for the audition and he told himself no one would question it because it was nearly Halloween. He was wrong - no one questioned it because he was in L.A.

October has a certain smell, like apples and spices and cleanliness. It feels like the right time to put clothes on the line, and it’s the first time in months that he smells backyard fires after the bans are lifted for the winter. He thinks of camping with his family. If he thinks hard enough he can even feel the itch of Halloween makeup on his face.

October also brought Zach, all those years ago. Chris wonders why it is that not speaking to Zach for three months feels worse than leaving his last girlfriend, and then he tries to force himself down a different line of thinking.

Zach’s even back home in Los Angeles, permanently - or, well, ‘semi-permanently,’ he says, enough so that he’s bought a house and uprooted his animals. He still has the apartment in New York though, just in case.

They did a great job of keeping in touch for the first year he was back. Years after the last Trek they were still able to start conversations where they had left off before they were separated by a continent, and their physical affection hadn’t changed a bit. Zach was still handsy and it still made Chris giddy.

Life gets in the way, a bit, when someone is right there and easily accessible. It gives a false sense of stability in the friendship and it’s somehow easier to let the text conversations trail off and the uninvited visits trickle into nothing. He’ll think, ‘I can just check in with him tomorrow, or next week, or I’m sure he’ll give me a call in a few days,’ and then everyone is busy or working and then it’s three months later.

*

_People yelling at him to turn this way or that way or to smile more or less will never not be annoying, and it’s Zach’s M.O. to keep his face straight or smile as much as he pleases just to pretend he has any control of his own life anymore._

_The frenzy concentrates slightly to his left as the photographers start yelling at Chris, the same demands they were just yelling towards him. Zach winces and tries to subtly crane his neck to find him. They hadn't seen each other yet today, had press the day before and went to bed too drunk and way too late, and if Chris felt anything like Zach had this morning, they both slept in far too late as well._

_When Chris steps through the crowd of publicists and assistants, pulling the front of his suit jacket down and smoothing it out, Zach’s fingers curl and his breath stops. Chris is a shock of tan in a sea of black and navy, and his hair looks unreal, far from the absolute mess it was when they parted ways the night before. When Chris catches sight of him, his red carpet smile stretches into something inhuman, a bit magical, and he jogs over to Zach, slips an arm around his waist, and says, “Fuck, I love Berlin.”_

*

It strikes him that Zach’s most recent memory of him is not… the most flattering. Not horrible, nothing Zach had never seen before. He’d just gotten a touch too high and pulled into himself and was the worst houseguest ever. He had been a bit too afraid to say anything for fear of sounding silly to a person who has always been exceptionally patient with his stoned ramblings. Which is dumber than anything he could have said that night curled up on Zach’s couch. Zach had texted him the next day and asked how he was, told Chris he’d left his hat there, and Chris said he’d come get it soon.

He never did go, and now it had been long enough that he’d feel weird texting Zach just to say, ‘hey can I come by and get my hat?’ because it was too much like admitting that they'd lost touch.

He doesn’t want Zach to remember him like that. He wants Zach to remember him happy and clear-headed and so in love that he can’t stop smiling into the crook of Zach’s neck, but that’s not possible because Chris has never done that. Not with Zach. If Chris was gone, just disappeared tomorrow, Zach would have no such image of Chris in his memory banks, wouldn’t ever know that Chris had fallen madly in love with him that day in October fourteen years ago. If Chris was gone tomorrow, if he were to stand at the gates of heaven, if it existed, and watch Zach grieve, and know that the last thing Zach would remember of him was just a lump on a couch…

Chris turns his phone face up and starts at the time, 2:47, blinks into the low light of the one lamp he still has on. Wednesday is snoring on the couch when he lightly pets her head as he walks past, and she doesn’t stir when his keys jingle or when he closes and locks the door behind him.

*

_Chris calls him right away, FaceTimes him actually - Zach didn’t even know Chris knew how to do that. When Zach answers he’s met with the sweetest face of the cutest little Pittie ever, panting at the screen with Chris’s eyes peeking out above her head, crinkled at the corners and not at all dimmed despite the glare on his glasses._

_“My name is Wednesday,” he says, “and I’m the best thing in the world.”_

_Zach's grinning as he holds up one finger, and says, “Hang on, let me get Noah.” He puts down his phone and runs to track down his pup and on his way back he can hear Chris saying, “Can you believe Uncle Zach put me on hold? Can you believe it? He’s so rude, yes he is, yes-” and the rest is cut off by what sounds suspiciously like a tongue in his mouth and a big belly laugh._

_Picking the phone back up, Zach says, “Don’t talk to her like a baby, man, you’ll get her all confused.”_

_“Uncle Zach thinks you’re not a baby, but you’re the most perfect baby ever, isn’t that right?” Chris is laying it on thick this time, glancing at Zach out of the corner of his eye. Zach doesn’t give him the satisfaction of a laugh, but it’s a close thing._

_They talk for hours, long enough that they both have to get their chargers and plug in. Zach isn’t sure when both the dogs were let down to go do their own thing, but he knows that the majority of that call was just him and Chris, filling each house with conversation it would otherwise have been devoid of._

*

He mumbles to his phone halfway through his drive to text Zach, ‘It’s me,’ self-aware enough that if he woke up to someone banging on his door at three in the morning he’d be calling the cops, not assuming it was his best friend. The sound of his own voice is alien - groggy and sleep-thick. His google assistant happily types away, though, reads it back then sends it on.

The code to Zach’s gate is the same, and Chris is pleased to see a light on in the kitchen when he pulls the car up to the front step. Zach opens the door before Chris has even stepped fully out of the car and Chris says, “Were you already awake?” into the California-crisp autumn air.

Zach nods and smiles slow. He looks about as tired as Chris feels. Chris wants so badly to pet the uncooperative hair back into place on Zach’s head, so he sticks his fingers into the pockets of his jeans and glides through the door in one quick step. He follows Zach into the kitchen and takes the coffee he’s offered. It’s perfect; of course it is. Something tightens painfully and splendidly around his chest at the thought that Zach remembers his coffee preferences, like a schoolgirl with a crush on her favourite band member.

“I feel like people remember me wrong,” Chris says. He skips the general greetings and small talk. They’re past that. Long past.

Zach’s eyebrows pull together as he sets his mug down, fingers still wrapped tightly around it, and sighs. He looks across the island at Chris and leans his weight on his forearms and elbows. He looks concerned, but patient.

“How do you think people remember you?”

Chris shakes his head and looks away, swirls his coffee, taps his nails on the marble countertop. Stalling.

*

_Zach is in town for a few days and Chris is busy with filming, so they fire texts back and forth to try to schedule something, any slot of time they can both spare just to say hello. He won’t admit that he’s ignoring the friends he’s currently sitting with at this bar in order to type out said texts, but he doesn’t get the chance anyway because then someone comes up behind him and rests their hands on his shoulders, fingertips squeezing lightly above his collarbones. Zach smells him before he sees him, the same warm, soft scented body wash he’d been using the last time Zach was in town._

_Joe doesn’t look surprised, nodding to Chris above Zach’s head, phone upright on the table. It had been vibrating all night. Sneaky. They’re sneaky._

_When he looks over his shoulder he feels his jaw slacken, completely out of his control._

_Texting and talking on the phone means you don’t see a person, sometimes for a long time, and Zach knew Chris had grown a beard, knew he’d grown his hair out, because Chris had told him about it before he started filming A Wrinkle in Time. It's just that Zach never pictured it when they were talking, he still always imagined him clean-shaven or five o’clock shadowed._

_This is a whole new level of hairy for Chris._

_Zach stands and folds him into a hug, says, “You’re a sneaky one, Sasquatch,” which elicits an actual guffaw from Chris._

_“You know I look good, man, don’t even try to deny it,” Chris says. He’s smirking behind his beard, false confidence, then he ducks his head a little and his hair falls into his eyes. Zach wants to fix it, his fingers itch for it. When Chris runs his hand back through his hair and licks his bottom lip Zach’s pretty much done for. He lets Chris and Joe get caught up, even lets Joe introduce him to the others before Zach finds his voice again, before he’s confident his words will come out steady._

*

“Not people, I guess. Just you.”

Zach’s eyebrows raise at that, and a smile tugs at one corner of his mouth. “How do you think _I_ remember you?”

Chris flushes, the room feeling a few degrees too warm, but he doesn’t let go of his mug. It feels like it’s keeping him rooted there, like if he lets go he’ll float on out the window and pretend this conversation never happened, tell himself it was a dream.

“The wrong way?”

Zach’s face drops into false neutral, shoots him a pointed look. “Well that was a terrible answer. Very informative.”

Chris snorts, sighs, looks around the room hoping he’ll find something that will either keep his interest or help him figure out what to say. He finds his hat hung on the coat rack in the hallway.

“My hat.”

“Chris. Please. I’m way too tired for your cryptic ‘I Spy’ game, come on,” he says, but he’s still smiling, so friendly and open and he’s not really exasperated, Chris thinks. It usually is sarcasm with them, anyway, so this feels more like familiar territory.

The mug makes a horribly loud clink when he sets it down and he flinches into the silence that follows. He steps around the island and faces Zach, who turns and leans a hip on the counter.

“Ok. I left my hat here. Months ago, right?” Chris says, and his hands are exceptionally clammy all of a sudden. Zach nods and squints at him. “And that night I was pretty out of it, right?” Again, Zach nods and his face loosens, his mouth opening, and before he can tell Chris that he doesn’t care how high Chris gets, Chris continues, “I just - I realised I don’t want that to be the last thing you remember of me. That’s all.”

*

_Something rumbles amongst the blankets and hoodies piled in the other corner of the couch._

_“Hmm?”_

_Chris’s fingers appear in the hole by his face and pull the fabric back, pushes his head out a little further into the room and says, voice low and soft, “I love being here.”_

_Zach huffs a laugh around his cigarette, smoke billowing out faster than he’d like. “Where? Entombed in 10 tonnes of blankets?”_

_“Entombed,” Chris repeats quietly, enunciating very carefully each letter and syllable._

_“Submerged. Enveloped. Sequestered-”_

_“Alright, alright,” he says. “Yes. Well. No.”_

_Chris may be a little more high than Zach realised._

_“Be a little more specific,” Zach says. “Use your words.”_

_Chris is quiet for a moment, and it looks like he’s trying to look right through Zach, eyes burning unordered shapes into Zach’s face. “Here. With you. At your house.”_

_It’s late and Zach is tired, and at the time it feels like the right thing to do not to respond to that. He lets it sit in the room like another person, and eventually Chris disappears back into his blanket cave and Zach slips down a little further on the couch. He reaches a hand down and rests it on Chris’s ankle, whisper light touches as he runs his thumb around the bone._

_They settle for a while. Zach thinks Chris might be asleep, but he peeks out again, and his eyes are shining, bright and happy._

_Zach could trace the lines of Chris’s face from memory if he needed to; the crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiles wide, the way his eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks in the dim light of Zach’s lamp, the shine on his lower lip after he swipes his tongue across it compulsively._

_If they could stay here forever, he’d be happy. If Zach was gone tomorrow, just disappeared, this moment would be enough, he thinks._

_He dozes and wakes up a couple times, and Chris doesn’t move, the sole of his foot still pressed against Zach’s thigh, toes curled underneath. Zach hesitates before he gets up, laments that he’ll have to wake Chris, but if he doesn’t Chris’ll wake up with a crick in his neck that he’ll feel for days._

_He peels back the blankets from around Chris’s head and feels his face pull into a smile that gives away too much fondness when Chris blinks up at him. Zach reaches out and flicks the lamp off. Chris is watching him, face lit up by the city, beams of Los Angeles shining in on him, and it’s a vision worth remembering._

_Zach doesn’t think he’ll forget, not this - Chris curled up, in Zach’s blankets, on Zach’s couch, like he’s home._

*

Zach sets his mug down now, too, and touches Chris’s wrist, wraps his warm fingers around it, fingertips on his pulse and thumb swiping along his forearm. Chris can hear him swallow, that’s how quiet Zach’s house is.

“Chris,” he ducks his head and forces the eye contact Chris was doing a very good job of avoiding, “why would that be the last thing I remember of you? You’re freaking me out. What’s going on, Pine?”

The use of his last name causes a hysterical little laugh to bubble up in him, and he shakes his head again, turns his hand over. He grasps Zach’s hand and draws him closer as he says, “No, I’m fine, don’t worry. I’d just rather you had a better memory. If it was up to me, you know.”

Zach presses his thumb into the heel of Chris’s hand and massages away the tension. “Isn’t it? Up to you? It’s always been up to you, Chris. Your decision.”

He keeps repeating Chris's name and it sounds sacred coming out of that mouth, and now Chris really feels like he's about to float away. He flicks his eyes to Zach’s lips and he guesses there’s no mistaking that, so he pulls Zach a little closer still, rests his hand on Zach’s neck and rubs his jaw with his thumb, gently tugs Zach to him and kisses him. He tries to put his whole self into it, tries to telegraph everything he’s felt for fourteen years into one kiss because it may be the only chance he has at this.

Zach sighs into it, and he feels Zach’s hands, warm and soft, flutter around and under his shirt, palms flat on either side of his spine, fingers clenching, a solid weight holding him close.

“It’s always been your choice, Christopher.” He keeps their lips connected as he speaks and Chris feels every word.

He dips to lean his forehead against Zach’s jaw, can’t stop the smile from spreading across his face and when he kisses Zach’s neck, it’s really mostly teeth.

Later, with Zach leaning over him in bed, elbows on either side of Chris’s shoulders and his hands in Chris's hair, he stops to think that whatever it was that had prevented him from doing this years ago, whatever self-doubt or delusion clouded his vision, it must have been extraordinary, it must have been engulfing him. He looks at Zach now and it’s plain as day: Zach’s always felt the same way he feels.

It feels like elation and the best kind of anticipation; something wistful taking hold, a nostalgia for things yet to come. Zach was always going to be a prominent figure in the story of his life, someone who would flit through the slides over and over again if he let himself believe that your life flashed before your eyes. Now, he’ll be a permanent fixture. He’ll weave his way in and out of every story, every experience, every relationship. He’ll make Chris better for it, help him claw his way out of these pits that feel like rock-bottom, or brighten his already blinding days into something impossibly radiant.

Every reverent touch breaks his heart, mourning the life before, that they’d missed out on this for so long. He’s grateful, though, for what they’ve got coming, and for whatever memories they’re allowed to build from here, together.


End file.
